Dec 14, 2015

For the past six weeks, I've been heading up a little newsroom of nine people at the journalism school at the University of King's College. It has been both exhausting and rewarding. It's been an enormous learning experience for me, as much as for my students. They went to council, court, press conferences and the provincial legislature. They posted their stories on a website called The Signal. We had fun but we worked like dogs.

The course drove me to insomnia. I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something I had or hadn't told them. I found all these phrases coming out of my mouth:

"How do you know this?"

"There are no stories in the newsroom."
"You don't need these words."

"It is what it is."

It was collected wisdom from dozens of people. I thought a lot about the way my assignment editor gets a read on people, the way my producer makes decisions. I thought about talented people I learned from who retired recently. They're never going to get to work with these young people. I felt a bit like I had to distill everything I've ever learned and pump it into my students.

So now I'm going back to CBC and the students are going on to other workshops to learn other skills. I'm very proud of them for how hard they worked and how much they learned. If they keep it up, they'll be unstoppable.